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One Year Later, Military Says Gay Policy Is Working

In July, sailors marched in a gay pride parade in San Diego. The display would have violated military rules a year earlier.Credit
Gregory Bull/Associated Press

WASHINGTON — Every Tuesday and Friday morning in a dining area tucked behind Dunkin’ Donuts in the Pentagon’s main food court, a gay coffee group meets to talk, do a little business and tell a few jokes.

Started quietly by a handful of Air Force officers in 2005, the gathering has grown to as many as 40 people since the repeal of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy last September. The crowd is a testament to the openness in the military now that gay, lesbian and bisexual service members no longer have to keep their sexual orientation secret or face discharge — and also to how such gatherings are still needed.

“Honestly, it’s a support group,” said Sean M. Hackbarth, the Air Force lieutenant colonel, now retired, who started the gatherings of uniformed military and civilian defense workers and who still drops by for coffee when he’s at the Pentagon. “It’s a way of making people less afraid. Even with repeal, there’s still that trepidation of being out in the military.”

It has been exactly a year since “don’t ask, don’t tell” was repealed, and by most measures the change has been a success. Gay service members say they feel relief they no longer have to live secret lives. Pentagon officials say that recruiting, retention and overall morale have not been affected. None of the dire predictions of opponents, including warnings of a mass exodus of active duty troops, have occurred.

“My view is that the military has kind of moved beyond it,” Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta said in May, eight months after the repeal. Even the Marine Corps, the service most opposed to the change, has fallen in line. “I get in front of the Marines as often as I can, as long as I can get away from Washington, and I’ll be honest with you, I don’t even get a question,” the Marine commandant, James F. Amos, said at the National Press Club last month. “I’m very pleased with how this turned out.”

But both gay and straight service members say that ending the legal barriers has hardly erased all the cultural ones, and that while the repeal has gone better than many expected, harassment and discrimination against gays in the military have not disappeared. “We were not fooling ourselves into believing there would be no incidents,” Jeh C. Johnson, the Pentagon’s general counsel, said in an interview.

Mr. Johnson, who with Gen. Carter F. Ham wrote a 2010 Pentagon report that concluded that gay men and women could serve openly with little risk to military effectiveness, said that he had handled fewer than 10 cases where harassment or discrimination against gay service members was alleged in the last year.

One of the incidents, cited in some news reports this spring, occurred in April at a ball at a New York military installation, where a female officer was dancing with her girlfriend, another officer, and a squadron commander told the two women to stop. The situation escalated to the point that the commander’s top enlisted adviser, a sergeant major, shoved one of the female officers across the floor.

Aubrey Sarvis, an Army veteran and the executive director of the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, said in an interview that after the female officers contacted his organization, the Pentagon investigated and the squadron commander and the sergeant major were relieved of their jobs and forced to retire. “Unfortunately, I could see this as being a teaching moment for commanders on what not to do,” Mr. Sarvis said.

Photo

In June, a Navy chaplain officiated at the civil union of an Air Force sergeant and his partner at a military base in New Jersey.Credit
Jeff Sheng, via Associated Press

In other cases service members have said they were denied promotions or assignments because of their sexual orientation, but Mr. Sarvis said his group had investigated and found no basis for the complaints.

A far more serious incident occurred over Labor Day weekend outside a gay bar in Long Beach, Calif., where four Marines were arrested and accused of beating a young film student so severely that he ended up in the hospital. The Marines reportedly shouted antigay slurs before the attack. Commanders are investigating.

Gay, lesbian and bisexual service members are thought to make up at least 2 percent of the military’s 2.2 million forces on active duty and in the reserves and National Guard. Military officials say they do not know how many gay men and lesbians have come out since the repeal, but a survey by OutServe, a two-year-old organization for gay service members, found that 32 percent had revealed their sexual orientation in the last year.

“A large percentage choose to remain in the closet, and part of that is they are reading signals from their peers that it is still not O.K. to be out in the military,” said Aaron Belkin, the director of the Palm Center, a branch of the Williams Institute at the U.C.L.A. School of Law that published a study this month effectively declaring repeal of the policy a nonevent. “You have a masculine organization which is largely conservative and it takes time to turn that ship around.”

Gay service members say that for all the firsts in the past year — the first gay wedding at a military base, the first openly gay general — there remains a tolerance in many quarters for gay jokes and slurs. The repeal, they say, has at least made them more comfortable in addressing them before they escalate.

Bert Gillott, a retired Air Force master sergeant who worked until recently in the protocol office of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, said he had been taken aback last fall when he heard the senior enlisted adviser to General Dempsey, Sgt. Maj. Bryan B. Battaglia, openly use a derogatory term for homosexual men and joke that he didn’t want any “gay” music at a military ceremony.

Asked by a reporter about the comments, Sergeant Major Battaglia’s office e-mailed a statement saying that he did not recall making the remarks, “fully supports the repeal of don’t ask, don’t tell” and “has made it clear throughout our armed forces that any form of discrimination, hate crime, hazing, bullying, sexual assault, etc., will not be tolerated.”

Mr. Gillott, who has been a member of the gay coffee group, said at a recent gathering that finding the group was “nirvana” to him. “For years we’ve been fringe,” he said. “Finally I’ve met other people in the military who are gay.”

One longtime opponent of repeal, Elaine Donnelly, said in an interview on Wednesday that she remained unmoved by the relative calm of the past year and predicted future problems. “People in the military follow orders,” she said. “Silence should not be interpreted as a sign of approval or success.”

Correction: September 21, 2012

A picture caption on Thursday with an article about gay, lesbian and bisexual members of the military service described incorrectly a ceremony being performed by a Navy chaplain for an Air Force sergeant and his partner at a military base in New Jersey. It was a civil union, not a wedding.

A version of this article appears in print on September 20, 2012, on Page A17 of the New York edition with the headline: One Year Later, Military Says Gay Policy Is Working. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe